Rowans Tenpin Bowling Where is it? Finsbury Park. Opening hours? 10.30am to 12.30am Sun to Thurs, 10.30am to 1.30am Fri and Sat. What is it? One cannot render the majestic wonder of Rowans through the written word alone. Rowans is a whispered dream. Rowans is your brain on the most magic of mushrooms. Rowans is a half-remembered childhood memory of a…

The Queen Adelaide (by Hannah Burke) Where is it? Hackney Road — don’t confuse with the venue bearing the same name in Putney. Opening hours? 5pm-1am Monday to Wednesday, 5pm-3am Thursday and Friday, 4pm-3am Saturday, and 4pm-1am Sunday. What is it? A snug and kitchsy queer pub with a pokey basement for dancing until the wee hours. Dress code? It’s a queer venue in Hackney babes…

Peckham Riviera Where is it? The clue’s in the name; Peckham, South London. To be precise, Unit 4 Dovedale Trading Estate, London SE15 4QN. Opening hours? Til 12am, seven days a week. What is it? A jack of all trades but master of none. Which is to say it’s an outdoor bar under a plastic canopy serving (overpriced) cocktails, craft…

At the beginning of 2020 I went to the Peak District. It seems an odd choice to be writing about this now, 12 months after the fact. Retrospectively of course, what seemed like a quaint, but unremarkable mini-break at the time has become emblematic of a style of travel…

A version of this article appeared in The Face Magazine. For a moment, the glimpse of a brighter world was possible. Then 10pm hit on the 12 December 2019 and the dream of our radical utopia (read: mild social democracy) lay dead at our feet. Barbarism won over the British…

“A woman must have money and a room of her own,” reads the Virginia Woolf quotation, plastered across the windows of an elegant Georgian townhouse in Bloomsbury. The building is home to The Allbright, a private members’ club for women billed as the ‘first in Britain’. …

The second time life deposited me in Helsinki, it was the beginning of August. Both I and the city had undergone radical change. In the eight months since I’d last walked Helsinki’s phenomenally clean streets, I’d jettisoned my comfy staff job at a magazine for an uncertain freelance career. In…

In 2019, I found myself in Helsinki twice. It was a quirk of coincidence as I had never considered visiting under my own steam at all, let alone two times in eight months. Nordic countries seemed somehow too adult for me and too expensive to boot. I had filed…

I went to Athens because I had been talking about it for so long, I feared it was going to soon join my pantheon of impossible dreams, former burning desires downgraded in status as they get superseded by something more immediately achievable. Athens, I thought, was a concept that deserved…